More room for a territorial approach and innovation

The Leader programme and other integrated policies (such as the European Territorial Pacts for Employment, for example) encompass a suite of ingre-dients which perhaps best serve to codify the territorial approach from a methodological point of view. These programmes, however, have evolved over time and there is a great deal of variation in the way in which the same Leader is implemented across Europe ]Mantino et al, 2009]. The more general ingredients of the territorial approach may be defined as follows:

a) focus on specific places;

b) strategy which aims at supporting the provision of public goods

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and services within an integrated vision of all territorial resources;

c) need for multilevel governance, ensuring co-ordination and net-working both in the vertical sense (relations between the different levels of government) and in the horizontal sense (relations between actors and stakeholders living and/or operating in the specific territory, codified through a public-private partnership, which in the case of Leader is the Local Action Group);

d) focus on investment in different sectors, rather than subsidy to agriculture.

Leader was not the only territorial programme to be implemented in rural areas in Europe. Other types of programmes have been designed and implemented in rural areas, both within the Structural Funds and the EAFRD. Some of these programmes were financed in the past through national budgets too, as a result of a process of mainstreaming by Member States and regions.

Some projects with a territorial approach have also been implemented within the present programming period in the RDPs. This is the case when the localized filière projects (agriculture, food processing and marketing) are funded or when both measures and funds are managed through sub-regional programmes. The scale could be very small (single municipality or groups of municipalities) and in this case we could find projects linked to very local markets (niche products, high quality product -a PDO wine or a GOP cheese).

Another interesting case of territorial approach is when the decentraliza-tion process implies that the programming and implementadecentraliza-tion phases are delegated to a scale which can be considered to be lower than the regional scale (i.e. the Italian Provinces).

The current rural development programming period (2007-2013) is also characterised by a level of innovation in terms of integrated local develop-ment strategies. Certain Member States have strengthened the importance of this approach (Italy, Portugal, Ireland, some French regions); others, such as France, have strongly revised the previous approach. In general, interesting tendencies are emerging in the present programming phase and these can be summarised as follows:

• there is an increasing interest in designing and experimenting with territorial approaches within the RDPs in different Member States and regions;

• these approaches frequently involve protected areas, regional and national parks, etc. due to the need for and advantages of combining environmental, economic and social aspects in the local strategy;

• this logic is reflected in the mix of eligible measures for the local plans (they go from the typical Axis 2 measures to a wide range of Axis 3 measures and also to some Axis 1 measures);

• the model of partnership admitted by the Managing Authorities and selection criteria is different from the classical Leader model, and more flexibility is allowed for the relationship between individual partners and between partners and the management authority;

• finally in some cases, particular attention is given to the relations between these new partnerships and eventually the LAGs which are operating on the same territory, in order to foster synergy and avoid duplication.

In conclusion, it must be underlined that the new programming phase confirms the importance of the territorial approach in those countries which have already experimented in the past¹⁶. In the light of these

inter-16 The diffusion of this approach seems to be less popular in the new Member States, where more traditional approaches have been adopted. This depends partly on strong pressure to follow a more traditional approach due to the fear of low rate of expenditure absorption over the period 2007-2013.

And this also partly depends on the novelty of this approach in the Central-East administrative structures,

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esting experiences that confirm the demand for a more territorial approach in several countries, it seems necessary that integrated local development strategies be confirmed as a fundamental instrument for the next program-ming period. They should be:

• based on the above mentioned general ingredients;

• funded by specific budget allocations;

• more oriented to innovation.

As for the specific budget allocation, territorial approaches could be funded by financial resources potentially addressed to all priorities and the running costs of the partnerships within the “local capacity building and governance”.

Territorial approaches taking the form of Leader-like projects could be financed following two different options:

a) local integrated projects within the mainstream b) local integrated projects outside the mainstream.

In the first option local integrated projects could be financed by all measures of RDP (without any particular restriction by managing authority) or, as an alternative, by a combination of different funds in order to increase the room for manoeuvre of the local partnerships. Local integrat-ed projects, in the first case, would be focusintegrat-ed on filière, agro-tourism, ecotourism in protected areas, etc. Multi-sectoral projects, instead, would

require merging different Funds. The combined use of different Funds in an integrated strategy at local level calls for two fundamental conditions:

largely centralised and based on the central structure of the Ministry of Agriculture.

• the harmonization of management rules set out by the different Funds, in order to permit an easy and efficient handling of the local interventions by the local partnerships;

• the setting up of an inter-departmental (inter-services) co-ordina-tion structure at naco-ordina-tional/regional level that is capable of under-taking the functions of selection, approval and monitoring of local partnerships. This co-ordination structure should include officials of different administrations (operating in the fields of different Funds). This organization recalls the experience of Leader 1, where local development strategies were funded by three Structural Funds (EAGGF-Guidance included) and for this reason there were severe delays in setting up the needed ruling organization.

The ways these two conditions are faced and defined are crucial in order to choose the best approach to manage territorial approaches in the future.

The second option (outside the mainstream) is more radical, as it involves a very different design, management and funding of the local development strategies. In this case local strategies and partnerships would be selected, approved and financed directly by the European Commission under the form of innovative projects, without any national or regional filter. These innova-tive local development strategies would be selected on a competiinnova-tive basis (without national pre-allocations) by the Commission services and would be supported by some intermediate body (of public nature) for advice, animation, monitoring and control. The intermediate body should have the independence and the expertise to ensure an efficient and effective man-agement of these tasks. A similar approach was suggested by the Barca Report (2009) to promote experimentalism and mobilize local actors.

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